In many three dimensional measurement applications it is generally necessary to reposition measurement devices multiple times at different measurement positions so that measurements can be performed on an entire object. These repositioned measurement devices operate within a local coordinate system where the orientation and origin of the local coordinate system is relative to a respective repositioned measurement device. The measurements taken at each measurement position must be transformed so that all the measurements from the different measurement positions are integrated into a single global coordinate system to obtain a complete measurement or mapping of an object being measured. Generally this integration into the single global coordinate system is performed post measurement (e.g. downstream of the measurement process) using, for example, alignment techniques such as point-pair and best fitting.
Alignment of the different measurements and integration into the global coordinate system is generally time consuming and generally involves fitting adjacent measurements (e.g. scans of point clouds for example) by locating three or more common points in the measured data for an initial fit. Subsequent to the initial fit or alignment the measurement data is best fit using overlapping data. As noted above, this is a time consuming process and is performed well after the measurement device is moved from one measurement point to another measurement point. Alignment of the different measurements is generally a manual process that is often performed on-site to ensure that sufficient data coverage and sufficient overlap is present to align the measurement data. This measurement and alignment process is often critical in production of, for example, aircraft or other manufactured items, and leads to downtime in production.